What It Would Have Taken
by Quil Explodes
Summary: Minerva McGonagall reflects in the aftermath of the Battle of Hogwarts.


Minerva McGonagall has always thought of herself as a strong woman. But now, wandering almost lost among the dead, she has never felt less so.

It has always been so clear to her, what she must do. It has always been so easy for her, in a way, to do what she feels she must.

But now, wandering among the dead, she is lost.

She witnesses little Dennis Creevey sob over his brother's body, and Molly Weasley, a woman she had long respected for her solidity and her willingness and her openness towards nearly everyone, reduced to a quivering, helpless, crying mass.

Minerva McGonagall has always thought of herself as a strong woman, ever since her eighteenth year - or perhaps a while after it.

Many years. Is that how long it will take for everything to be the same?

It's a foolish question - Minerva McGonagall, of everyone, should know. These mourning people would never heal.

She feels the sewn-up edges of her heart wriggling free. Biting free. Eating their way into her soul. There should never be this much loss. She is angry, now, very quietly, because she chose to work at a school because of the children and she knew she'd never have any of her own and it helps a broken heart, sometimes, to be around their shouting playing eager learning mass.

She finds it hard to differentiate at times.

She never thought she'd fall in love with a Muggle, especially when her father told her those were dangerous times in the Muggle world. But she was eighteen and freshly graduated and buoyed by the sense of her own magic and she didn't think a few of those strange Muggle contraptions or those strange Muggle battles could hurt her or those she chose to protect.

She never brought his sense of duty into the equation. She never thought of what it would be like to live your whole life without magic, to live your whole life bothered by a lack of food or a cold drafty room or shortages or guns. Little petty things a wave of her wand would fix. She never thought of what it would be like to have your parents and your siblings and your friends and your whole life involved in this incomprehensible war, battered and hungry because of this bewildering war, impassioned and stubborn because of this useless staggering war.

She reels when she sees Remus' body even though she already knew and she's seen it before. And his young wife beside him.

At least she had never seen _his_ body.

Remus. _Remus Lupin_, who she's known for nearly his entire life, _Remus Lupin_ who was the kindest, sweetest child she's ever met in all her years of teaching, _Remus Lupin_ who was made an outcast and shunned and hated by the world but still found it in himself to love it and protect it and die for it.

It breaks her already-broken, half-mended twice-over heart.

And his young wife beside him.

She stares even though she knows she shouldn't, stares because she wonders for that brief moment what it would have meant. What it would have been. How many people she could have saved if she had joined him with her hair hidden in a cap and her wand hidden in her sleeve, like in some fantasy story, where all is glory and all is clear. What would it have been like to be at his side, Transfiguring the enemies into mice and their strange weapons into dust that would fall onto the ground harmlessly, caressing the trampled plants and coating the land.

She is a Gryffindor, however many years it has been since she'd been Sorted; she is a Gryffindor, no matter what has passed. She fought in this battle but she couldn't fight in his, a battle filthy with blood and guts and crude Muggle weapons that blasted you apart from yards away, crude Muggle weapons that were made to kill in the most painful way imaginable.

She had wondered how he had died - but no Muggle weapon is as painless as Avada Kedavra. And no children were fighting in that war, unless you count an eighteen-year-old as a child. She knows she would now - seeing Mandy Brocklehurst's mangled body certainly doesn't change that - but she was eighteen then, and she was grown, and she had the power to save his life with a mere flick of her wand and she didn't.


End file.
